403: Gay Bar 4 - Rodrigues

Charles Rodrigues
Playboy, December 1967

Did straight bars of the 1960s really feature giant paintings of naked ladies? How would I know. But an appreciation of naked ladies is one of the tickets to heterosexuality.

Did gay bars of the 1960s have giant paintings of naked men? Almost certainly not, since gay bars existed by flying under the radar and not being too blatant. But hey, this is just a comic reversal.

The patrons in their tight trousers (compare to trousers of the two straight men), their effeminate stance, and their bouffant hair.

Roughly contemporaneous with this cartoon is “The Gilded Lily” and its clientele in S. Clay Wilson’s “Ruby the Dyke and Her Six Perverted Sisters Stomp the Fags” (1967)

360: S. Clay Wilson – Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates

“Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates” by S. Clay Wilson –
in “Zap” #3, 1968

What to say, what to say. I suppose there’s some inspiration in the old line about “rum, sodomy and the lash”. Rough old salts who are as “perverted” as he can make them. Almost no fetish left undrawn. George wearing lipstick might be thought to be classic gay cliché, but it’s done in such a way as to show it’s atypical.
All this is recognisable S.Clay Wilson. Sex and violence in the most grotesque combination. Never knowingly moderate, Wilson’s drawings are a deliberate affront, a reaction against sterile bourgeois good taste and standards of living. Ultimately though, they’re only ever lines on paper.
This work is surprisingly important. “Zap” was one of the most important and influential of the underground commix. And this work was particularly influential:

“Not to diminish Crumb’s major contributions to ”Zap” or underground comix in general, Moscoso credits S. Clay Wilson with inspiring the contributors to feistily bust taboos. “First Wilson comes out with the “Checkered Demon,” then “Captain Piss Gums and his Perverted Pirates,” in which he is drawing my worst fantasies! Frankly, we didn’t really understand what we were doing until Wilson started publishing in “Zap”. I mean, he’s not a homosexual, yet he’s drawing all these homosexual things. He’s not a murderer, yet he was murdering all these people. All the things that he wasn’t, he was putting down in his strips. So that showed us that we were, without being aware of it, censoring ourselves.”” – Steven Heller, “Print”, 2000

So the filthy, let-it-all-hang-out underground really starts with a gay gangbang, an orgy of cock-sucking. Which if that’s the start, no wonder homosexuality gets left behind as those who want to end up exploring ever more unusual and disturbing subject matter.

As a side-note, and since this page gets looked at a lot:
S. Clay Wilson suffered a debilitating head injury several years ago. Donations to his care can be made at
http://sclaywilsontrust.com

359: S. Clay Wilson - early works 1967 - 1969

“Ruby the Dyke and Her Six Perverted Sisters Stomp the Fags” (1967) in “Radical America Komiks, 1969
An early example of the patented S. Clay Wilson battle panorama. This early in his career he enjoys drawing disparate and unlikely groups having it out, whereas later these frenzied scenes are usually reduced to pirates or bikers. Hence diesel dykes beating the shit out of fashion gays. Ruby the Dyke will become a regular character in his work. It is a little difficult to discern in the melee, but Clay’s “fags” are typical stereotypes of the mid-60s. They wear tight “fag pants”, and Cuban high-heeled, sharp toed “fruit boots”, and the striped shirts that were thought rather gay at the time too. And why, there’s a gay bar too, “The Gilded Lily”, because that’s the sort of name people tend to think gay bars are called. Anyway, here it is, violence, with the suggestion of “perverted” sex because of the nature of the combatants.


“Yellow Dog” #4, 1968
Hey, rough tough greasy dirty gay bikers. Ambiguity is probably deliberate as to the intent of “Whad’ya eat last?”


“Yellow Dog” #8, 1969
Also another early appearance of a S. Clay Wilson stalwart, the Checkered Demon. Here meeting a lisping sissy in fashionable attire, although it’s the second panel that merits the inclusion here. The sixth panel – is it sex or violence – take your pick.
“Yellow Dog” was a very early San Francisco commix anthology. Most of its content were either whimsical cartoons or sequences of psychedelic doodles. So the two pieces by S. Clay Wilson here are little less in-yer-face than thbe works he would very shortly be publishing in “Zap” and that would define his career and subject matter.